It’s hard to say what’s worse: that The Post believes there’s a need for “experimental, visually driven” content “designed for millennial women,” or that it has spent the better part of a year or more developing this idea while its Local section becomes more anemic with each passing week.

The are numerous problems with the paper’s forthcoming “product” The Lily, conceived by the paper’s Emerging News Products team (caps theirs) and launching next week to “emphasize platform-specific storytelling, integrating smart content with striking visuals to inform and entertain.” 

But let’s focus on this one: how utterly patronizing. Millennial women are somehow so vapid and incurious that The Post needs to “reimagine” its award-winning national reportage with color-by-numbers, Snapchat-friendly aesthetics? Like Highlights magazine for grown fucking people? Something tells us The Lily will be heavy on Style section content and light on the terrifying national and international news that twenty-something women could not possibly care about. Because, I mean, like, what they really want to know is where Angelina Jolie is getting her sleek, plane-friendly flats, right? 

How is it that The Post’s editors are sitting within croissant-throwing distance of multiple reporters who have won Pulitzer Prizes and yet are simultaneously so enamored with The Skimm’s approach to informing readers that they are willing to become national laughingstocks? The paper’s  readership—52 percent of whom are women, by the way—will no doubt recognize that they are being condescended to as if they are vacuous, shopping-crazy cyborgs without the slightest interest in reading news like the rest of us. 

The Lily should be pulled up by the root. Women want to be informed, not indulged with virtual binkies like overgrown toddlers.